Magellan (Magalhães)

 

Director Lav Diaz

director on the set

director with Sanny Joaquin and cinematographer Artur Tort

Diaz with assistant director Sanny Joaquin

Diaz with cast at Cannes

Gael García Bernal and Lav Diaz

Ferdinand Magellan at Naval Museum in Madrid

MAGELLAN (Magalhães)                 B                                                                         Philippines  Spain  Portugal  France  Taiwan  (163 mi)  2025  d: Lav Diaz

The promise of the Gods of the ancestors is upon us.                                                                   —Indigenous natives first reaction to seeing a white man

Lav Diaz is a pioneering Filipino auteur who re-examines history through his films which challenge conventional narratives, known for his long films and contemplative style, making films of moral complexity, often delving into the themes of history, suffering, and the human condition, whose earlier four-hour film Norte: The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2014) was an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  Writing and directing his own films, also sharing the cinematography and editing duties, while responsible for his own production design, most of his films are over five-hours in length, some of them pushing the nine and ten-hour mark, where six of his films are in the top 20 of the longest films of all time (List of longest films), offering an extensive exploration of the Filipino socio-political landscape through cinema, with Diaz indicating he is planning a nine-hour extended version of this film focusing more on the wife from about fifteen hours of footage shot but not used, releasing this more accessible shorter version under three hours for film festivals.  By retelling the tale of 16th century Age of Discovery explorer Ferdinand Magellan from a minimalist and modernist perspective, where he’s no swashbuckling hero of the seas, instead Diaz portrays him as radically antiheroic, depicting his voyage as a brutal, revisionist critique of colonialism, mythmaking, and religious zealotry driven by obsession, rejecting the typical “Great Man of History” narrative, conveying a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.  A meditation on the excesses of ambition and avarice, where we are forced to witness what colonialism looks like, with splashes of Native nudity, it’s a bit like John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), with men developing a God-complex, versed in their own moral superiority, viewing themselves above the teeming throngs, continually downplaying the needs and interests of the Indigenous tribes who are simply not like them, and therefore don’t matter as much.  It’s a somber case study of colonialist expansion, where the rest of the world is seen only by how it can benefit the country of origin that financed the expedition, in this case Spain, as Portugal, the country of Magellan’s birth, turned down his original request, as Portugal already had a highly profitable eastern seaward trade route to the Spice Islands via Africa, making a costly, highly speculative new western route unnecessary.  

Working in color for the first time in a decade, making his first film not in the Tagalog language, primarily using Spanish and Portuguese, with the director sharing cinematography and editing duties with Artur Tort, the regular cameraman for Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra, who is a producer on this film, screening in the Cannes Premiere section, yet in some ways it resembles Lisandro Alonso’s period film Jauja (2014) or Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) in its historical reach, while also treading on the same expansive territory as Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).  The difference is there’s absolutely no interiority of Magellan, or anyone else for that matter, though this is more restrained and nuanced from his other films, as Magellan’s quest turns into an obsession with power, leading to men questioning his leadership, where there’s a lot of inflicted cruelty both towards his own men, some of whom openly mutiny and are left behind in some God forsaken place in Argentina’s Patagonia, yet also towards the natives he meets in this “new world” of the Philippines.  Despite his meticulous planning, Magellan is unprepared for the difficulties he encounters attempting to pass the Strait of Magellan in the southernmost tip of South America, taking over a month, much longer than expected, with one mutinied ship returning to Spain, while another was lost at sea on an exploring expedition, yet even afterwards, setting sail into the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he is shocked that it takes months, not days, without encountering food, leaving many men dying of malnourishment or sick with scurvy en route, where his fleet of five ships is whittled down to just a single ship.  Like most Europeans at the time, however, Magellan thought Asia was much closer to South America than it actually is.  Far from the courageous explorer depicted in the history books, according to Diaz, who spoke at the Cannes screening, “Magellan is no hero—he is a man facing his own oblivion.”  There’s a lot of screaming to the high heavens, and praying to the spirits for divine intervene, yet also an autocratic ruthlessness rarely seen in depictions of epic explorations, where brutal punishment and death go hand in hand with hunger and starvation.  Yet most of all, it’s a depiction of supreme arrogance that leads to a massive sea of deaths, which mirrors the rampant corruption and presumptive superiority of the current Trump administration, but also authoritarian Filipino leaders Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte (currently on trial for war crimes), belittling others and downplaying the influence of anyone who does not comply with their directives or disagrees with their actions of enriching themselves, reviving the imperialist spirit of colonialism in the modern era.

The story is told in three sections, with the dates imprinted on the lower left side of the screen, the first is set in Malacca, Malaysia in 1511, commonly known as the Spice Islands, where Magellan (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, the first international star Diaz has ever worked with), under someone else’s command, Afonso de Albuquerque (Argentinean film critic and programmer Roger Alan Koza), participates in the capture of Malacca, leaving him wounded and injured in the leg, eventually limping from the onset of gangrene, yet they are victorious, with bloodied bodies seen strewn across the landscape, acquiring a Malay slave named Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), who is initially seen caged but becomes his own personal interpreter.  Little more than a footnote in history, Enrique is often omitted entirely, but in some ways he is the true protagonist of the film, patiently getting his revenge in obtaining his freedom, a near silent observer who has the last and final words of the film.  The second follows his recovery in Portugal where he has a controversial falling out with King Manuel I of Portugal, who rejected his plans for exploration and grew furious when he aligned himself with King Charles V of Spain, taking an oath of allegiance, which was paramount to treason in Portugal, as the two countries were arch rivals who were not only competing for dominance in the spice industry, but also for influence in colonies around the world.  It’s here that he takes a wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), who grows pregnant before his departure in 1519, and is seen as an angelic counterpart to his ruthless ambition, Magellan new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2025 (1/3) YouTube (1:45), surrealistically appearing in his dreams during the long voyage.  The proposed longer version supposedly revolves around Beatriz, where virtually nothing is known about her.  Once he sets sail, his 265 men all-Portuguese crew is mostly comprised of criminals, because many experienced sailors refused to support Magellan, unraveling in a long, slow section where time appears to stop, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (50 seconds), losing all that initial eager anticipation of what they may encounter, where the prolonged voyage severely weakens the crew, becoming a test of hunger and allegiance, exposing questions of loyalty, where Magellan’s behavior is markedly different than when they began, as he started treating his officers in a cruel way, growing very angry and indignant that some of them mutinied, forcing one to behead the other, subjecting men to lashes while executing crew members who engaged in homosexuality, according to a journal kept by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian navigator whom Magellan hired to keep detailed documents of the voyage.  Diaz apparently spent seven years researching Magellan, aided by Filipino historian Ambeth Ocampo, using a replicated reconstruction of the actual ship Victoria, historically accurate costumes, with no battle scenes, only the devastating aftermath is shown, and no actual violence other than what he forces his own sailors to endure on the ship, ultimately shifting the focus from the European perspective to that of the Indigenous tribes, becoming a revisionist work that goes against the grain of conventional historical accounts, much of which is little more than victorious mythmaking.

The third section shows Magellan arriving in the Philippines in 1521, a loose collection of kingdoms living in uneasy truce, comprised of more than 7000 islands, though fewer than 2000 are inhabited, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (1:32), which they thought to be the Spice Islands, but they didn’t find any spices, discovering instead a developed society, one not at all isolated from the outside world, possessing a written language, and already having some knowledge of Europeans through traders.  They are met by local leader Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), with Magellan offering sweet jam to his sick son, who may have been suffering from scurvy, while also presenting him with a statuette of Santo Niño to watch over him.  When the boy recovers, many attribute his miraculous recovery to God, quickly converting the island to Catholicism and baptizing the inhabitants, but in their zealous rush for complete domination, they destroy all remnants of the local anitos, viewing them as sacrilegious idolatry figures, an act that emboldens resistance, as their island way of life is being destroyed.  With obsessive delusions of grandeur and undisputed power, most of the tribes capitulate, but there are holdouts, with Humabon leading Magellan into the wrath of one of his foes, another chief named Lapu-Lapu who refuses to convert, instead mobilizing his forces against the foreign leader, with Magellan profoundly underestimating the strength of the natives, believing superior European weaponry would scare off the “barbarian” forces, but due to shallow waters, his ships remained at too great a distance to inflict harm, so he takes a small landing party of only about 60 half-armed men, burning the grass homes, which only helps mobilize the resistance, where the overwhelming counterattack by 2000 natives wipes out the European forces in what amounts to a massacre, killing Magellan on the spot, like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, leaving no survivors, turning tragically dark and morbid, a fate surprisingly narrated by Enrique, conveyed through an ultra-realistic approach to colonial violence.  The dead bodies on the beach paint a dire picture of human slaughter, with the remaining 18 men on the ship, one of whom is Enrique, quickly making a hasty exit and returning to Spain, becoming the only ship to completely circumnavigate the globe.  In the Philippines, Lapu-Lapu is a celebrated national hero for having withstood the initial European invasion, remaining a mythic cultural figure that remains embedded in the national consciousness, even warranting a national holiday, but Diaz subverts this image with provocative suggestions that Humabon, in an attempt to overcome his rival, may have invented Lapu-Lapu, who is never seen, and may not have ever existed in human form, cleverly planted in the mind’s eye as a myth to deceive Magellan and his men, which then leads to their downfall in an ambush, using the power of mythmaking as a political weapon.  Questioning whose version of history gets remembered, Diaz suggests history is not always used for truth, but for manipulation.